A glorious four and a half years at the place I’ve been working at has taught me many a lesson, and provided me with enough fodder and material to even write a complete book out of. Sadly, time are not there, failing which, I’d have given Chetan Bhagat a run for his money.

This particular post is inspired by a colleague, a campus recruit who joined my office in 2007. I don’t remember his name, nor his face. But the conversation I had with him will be etched in my memory for a long time to come.

His first line to me after some preliminary introduction was, “Which office do you work out of?”

Such ghastly displays of corporate whoredom from one so young sent me in a tizzy, and I wanted to take a stick and boink him on the head with it. Instead, I smiled politely and said, “Dude, I work IN phase 1.”

Now, if people decided to apply this form of speech for normal life, you’d have me sitting out of my chair, travelling out of a bus or a train, and staying out of home.

For the most part, people who I’ve spoken to about this anomalous usage of the language say it makes perfect sense, probably because they are inured to its absurdity, although I still maintain that it is counter-intuitive.

In any case, enough of this nonsense. I’ve got a busy day planned at the office, and I need to conserve some energy so that my brain functions out of my head properly.

Edit: Addendum follows.

Fond nostalgia kicks in again as I remember one of my first conversations within the office with someone from the Human Resources dept. Please note that some parts of it might’ve been ‘sexed-up‘ a little for future cinematic license.

HR: “Hari, have you received your next assignment?”
Me: “Yes, O Grand Poobah of HR, I have!”
HR: “So, we’ll have to shift you out of your training room. You’ll be working out of the fifth floor of this office.”
Me: “But I thought I was going to work in the fifth floor of this office!!!”
HR: “Exactly!!!”

I didn’t get it back then. I was dazed and confused. That feeling has only been compounded further in the past four and a half years. I still haven’t figured out much. I am thankful I’m leaving around the time they’d have caught up with my fraudness.

Why not my blessed cycle that I’ve been raving about, you wonder. Yeah, it makes me wonder too. But the sudden onset of a bad cold, a cough, a chest congestion that has caused my phlegm to come out almost solid-like isn’t really the best condition to be riding a bicycle in to work. Discretion is the better part of valour and all that junk.

Turns out, I’m now humming ‘All I want for this year is sleep’, to the tune of ‘All I want for Christmas is you’, and it isn’t even sounding funny. I have three grand ideas that I want to blog about, but in the classic case of (and this is a new one) my head and my heart v/s my body, the latter’s fatigue and NED seems to be overcoming the former’s zest for opinion expression.

In line with my current theme for 2009, and my wanting to sleep, I have decided that I want some psychedelic coloured pyjamas. I’m not a particularly big fan of sleep wear, having slept in old t-shirts and miscellaneous pyjamas all through, and shedding some of those during the hotter months.

But now, as I sit at the office at 3-30 AM on Sunday, the 4th of January 2009, working to get the GStreamer code integrated with my code for some audiobook to run on a hand-held device, all I can think of is polka-dotted pyjamas that I want to fall asleep in.

The pyjamas should be red. The dots should be blue, green, yellow, orange, pink and purple. (Any resemblance to the rainbow coloured flag is unintended, though I am all in support of those brothers and sisters who want to wave it unabashedly) I want even Govinda and Dennis Rodman to avert their eyes from said pyjamas and say ‘chi-chi’.

I think I couldn’t possibly write an arbitter post. So much for the first great weekend of this year. Have a great remaining 2009.

I’ve worked for a month or so towards ensuring that our office also becomes bicycle friendly – which means that they’d have to provide metal retainers to which one could lock one’s bike to, rather than just park it in the stand with two wheelers and risk someone lifting it off and carrying it away. My bike is so light despite being a mountain hardtail, and I am naturally paranoid about its security, and hence the retainers would go a long way in assuaging my fears.

Additionaly, I’d also requested for provisions to ensure that we’d have showers at the office, just so as not to raise a stink. Personally, this shower funda was raised keeping other people’s sensibilities in mind. I am totally comfortable with my odour (thanks to a phenomenon named olfactory adaptation, as learnt in class 11), and so far, I’ve not heard complaints. But then again, we’d not want cyclists at my office to get a bad name due to BO, and hence the necessary precaution.

Measures are being put into place as we speak in our parking lot, and I am eagerly waiting for the day which will bring about the unveiling of said facilities. However, I honestly got tired of waiting and decided to ride my bike to work. That was the only important place that I’d not taken it to.

Hence, on friday morning, I set out along the 11 km route, and as I reached the office, I suddenly realized that I had carried all my locks to tie up the bike, but I had forgotten the keys back at home. I had two options, one of which was to stash it in a friend’s car. Her Ford Ikon was not able to fit my bike, despite me having dismantled the front and rear wheel and the handle.

Consequently, I had to cycle back home, pick up the keys and cycle back to the office. By the end of the day, when I got home after a long day at work, which, incidentally was the last day at our office for my favourite manager (and the person who took my interview to recruit me in college), I had clocked approx 50 km, and I was raring to go for more.

I think I’m now an endorphin addict, for sure.

In other news: I always wear a helmet when riding my bike, even for short ranges. It is a combination of being paranoid about one’s safety, combined with the fact that the helmet makes me look cooler and gives the impression of me being a serious cyclist, as I mentioned before. I think it would be a 70-30 weightage break-up between the two factors.

In any case, some random guy asked me, ‘Why do you wear a helmet for riding a bicycle?‘ and my reply, which in retrospect was deeper than I had originally intended for it to be was, ‘Because I have a head‘.

I’m awesome.

The first one is the usage of the term ‘Geography‘ as a noun to refer to a particular region of the world. I’d remained blissfully untouched by this apparent misuse of the word until the completion of engineering college. Until then, geography was what I fervently believe it should always be – describing and writing about the earth.

Now, it is being used to refer to continents / countries on earth, such as the ‘Asia-Pac Geography’ and the ‘Europe Geography’ and so on. Whatever happened to using plain and simple ‘regions’ instead of saying ‘geography’?

The next thing that had me in splits the first time I heard it was the usage of the term ‘based out of‘. During campus recruit assimilation in 2004 at the only company I’ve been employed at so far, some big cheese spoke about how he was ‘based out of’ many locations during his career and ‘worked out of’ many important sounding places.

The little Hari inside my head was conjuring up images of how a person would be able to work, logically, in every place except the one he mentioned, if one were to take him literally. So, if someone were to tell you that he/she worked out of Bangalore, you’d assume that he/she would work every other place EXCEPT in Bangalore, but you’ll unfortunately realize that this is not the case.

Somehow the regular usage of ‘I am working at’ such and such office in this city has been discarded in favour of a seemingly complicated utterance.

Mercifully, these are two instances where TechSpeak is used blatantly, but doesn’t defy grammatical boundaries beyond a certain measure.

And to think of how I am accused of being sesquipedalian, when I just use big words instead of small without trying to alter the fundamental meaning of the sentences.

Gunda has had such tremendous fan following, and has had among the highest ratings [citation needed] that a Hindi movie could’ve ever had on IMDB for it incorporated all possible genres that one could think of into an intense three hour movie-thon.

Deshdrohi is the BIMARU film industry’s cinematic response of sorts to Raj T’s MNS’ anti-Bihari campaign. Now we all know that Raj Thackeray has been certified insane, and is doing this just like Paris Hilton did her multiple sexcapades and Presidential campaigns for footage from all quarters possible.

After enough visibility, Raj T plans to release an album and / or star in a few movies, but that was something his PR agent told me in strict confidence. Given the low readership of this website, I’m not really concerned about this news spreading around too much anyway.

“KRK is the new SRK“, screamed the headlines of the widely read Times of Patna. Considering the total subscribers of aforesaid esteemed newspaper are equal to the total number of google reader subscribers to this website, one can imagine how popular KRK has now become. Please note that I did not say ‘readers’, only ‘subscribers’. There is a difference.

With a star cast boasting of among others, Gracy Singh, who said this performance of hers makes her work in Lagaan look like that of Bobby Deol’s in Dostana, and Roza, who dated Saif Ali Khan for three days and landed six B and C grade movie offers in the process, as well as Hrishita Bhatt (who has added some three extra H’s and some seven T’s for numerological luck), who said in the Times of Patna that compared to KRK, SRK (with whom she’s worked in Asoka) was positively meh, this movie is also worth checking out for the eye-candy factor that it provides in addition to the strong social message which you can get when you watch the movie.

KRK has overthrown Ravi Kishan to now become the most sought after actor from the BIMARU states.

Ravi Kishan who needed a serial like Bigg Boss as well arbit ad-libbing of Kabir’s Dohas as the Bhojpuri voice of Peter Parker in Spiderman-3 to become famous all over the world has now gone on the offensive and last heard, was dubbing for all of Jean Claude Van Damme’s movies, to make JC’s famous quotes more accessible to everyone in the BIMARU region, while at the same time, increasing his market value.

In the Times of Patna, he was last quoted as saying that his drop in market value was due to the ” people going for recess” (emphasis mine) in Europe and America, and that once they all got back, he could start charging his regular rates. For the record, he was both a reader AND subscriber of the ToP.

KRK, reportedly charges a princely sum of INR 1000 per movie, and like Megamart’s offers, will do three for INR 2000, and perform his own stunts as well.

I would’ve quoted dialogues from the movie on my website, but I want all of you to go and watch the movie. I plan to convince my team at the office that this would be an ideal movie to watch during our upcoming team outing.

It is perfectly normal to be lazy, but somehow it is not looked upon as a desirable trait when you’re a student or an employee. An employer can afford to be lazy, on the other hand, simply by virtue of being able to write his own performance review and not having extraneous factors to point fingers towards, in case of facing any problems.

There have been times when I have wanted to take days off work, simply because I have accumulated leave and I’ve wanted to bask in the glory of nothingness, and this ‘have leave, will take’ policy has, in all probability, been put into use by other enlightened souls as well. However, I’d still have to justify it with having to finish personal work or something or the other that seems innocuous and raises no eyebrows.

However, if laziness is more accepted in our society, and the quality of sloth is removed from the list of seven sins (why have seven sins anyway, given that six would be cooler, with 666 and all that), I could as well say, “I’m feeling too lazy, and so I don’t want to show up for work / do whatever activity” and not have people look at me like I’ve just killed Bambi with a shotgun.

The Indian Medical Association should officially include laziness as a condition that can be used by people to excuse themselves from work, much like diarrohea, fever or a sprained neck. With official endorsement, offices, schools and colleges, and other places where one would like to turn away from due to the affliction of sloth would be more understanding of our total and absolute lack of inclination to go there sometimes.

This would ensure that I would be able to fill up “I’m feeling lazy” in the column where I am applying for leave, instead of having to fill up random mendacious stuff like “neighbour’s son’s thread ceremony” or “plumbing maintenance of house”. Taking time off for laziness would, in turn, foster better working relationships and as a result, would ensure that the employee works harder when at the office.

Now is not the time, not especially with the worst cold I’ve ever had this month, running through tissue after tissue, sounding like a snorting elephant. However, sitting at my desk, sneezing away, typing this post, I am a tad gleeful at the fact that all those other ignoramus morons who’ve been putting their cellphones in loud mode will have to bear the brunt of my snorting and nose-blowing.

Regretfully, I am not very keen on having a life long cold to counter those often atrocious ring tones, and I will have to resort to other less damaging counter-measures to ward off this crisis.

Last evening, I decided to scoot off early from the office in order to take my bike for a spin. The Trek 3700 was just calling out for me everytime I laid my eyes on it, and I had to rush back home to take it out. Armed with a helmet, and with front and rear LED lights (that can be set to flashing mode), I set out of my house, intending to just cycle arbitly so as to build up stamina for longer rides towards the band practise sessions in far away C V Raman Nagar.

Barely had I reached the end of the lane I live in, when I met up with someone who asked about my bike and helmet. Thereafter, he proceeded to take his bike out as well (another Trek 3700) and he showed me some new hitherto unknown route which went almost all the way through to Uttarahalli through Ittamadu.

Cycling through the roads aimlessly brought back a whole bunch of memories of having cycled the last time I had done so, which was to put a 15 mile ride in order to get bootlegged beer in Oslo late on a friday evening when all the alcohol selling places had shut shop.

However, the way back from aforesaid random place near my house wasn’t quite the joyride I had expected it to be, since the steep upward incline made me stop and alight from the bike, despite having switched to first gear to ride it. My legs felt like they were made of lead, and I was short of breath after about six km of cycling. However, I am most certain that with some amount of further riding, I should have decent stamina once again so as to undertake journeys that are four times this distance.

Like someone once said, it just takes a little getting used to. Further adventures to be updated on my website in due time.

At the height of the virus scare, the person who was given said nickname didn’t share my enthusiasm or my sense of humour, regretfully.

The saga of giving random nicknames began in college and has continued ever since even at the office. However, there definitely have been instances where I’ve brain-farted with my nomenclature, as can be illustrated with this example.

In college, there was this girl who was a year junior, and I did not know her name. Nor was I on speaking terms with her. But some of my friends and I thought she was cute. Hence she got the nickname – ‘cute girl’. Quite fairly obvious, and intuitive and easy to remember. Right?

A few days later, she was joined on a regular basis by this other friend of hers, who my friends and I thought was cuter than her. Initially, I chanced upon naming her ‘girl with cute girl’, but given that it sounded quite stupid, I changed that to ‘girl cuter than cute girl’ and so it stuck.

Now, those nicknames, I am not proud of. Not one bit. However, those are merely illustrative examples to indicate how despite having come up with names like ‘Lech Paaji’, ‘Doob Doob’ and ‘Lubdubi’, I haven’t been consistent all through.

Now ‘Lech Paaji’ was, as you can probably guess, a Surd who used to lech at women. His leching was, in fact, so intense that he embarassed most of the guys in his vicinity, and his supreme abilities to have his piercing stares zero in on certain aspects of the female anatomy didn’t leave absolutely anyone in doubt regarding what was on his mind.

‘Doob Doob’ and ‘Lubdubi’ were nicknames given to people who seemed ostensibly dumb, much as their counterparts in ‘Tinkle’ magazine, and were named so to continue the trend of naming people after characters from the ‘Tinkle’ universe.

However, some friends of mine at the office have hit upon a novel way of nicknaming cute women women they think are cute here at work. It has been based on the colour of their attire on the first day that they spotted one of said women.

Hence, nicknames such as ‘purple haze’, ‘black dahlia’, ‘simply red’ and ‘brown sugar’ keep being thrown about with gay abandon whenever I end up spending more than ten minutes with them, although that doesn’t happen often.

I must say I admire these guys deeply for their attempts to keep using these nicknames despite the fact that it is quite evident that these aforementioned women would keep wearing different coloured clothes on different occasions.

This has led to some pretty interesting conversational snippets that I have over-heard. “The one in pink is purple haze, dude! The one in black is the green lantern!” “No you moron, the one in blue is the pink panther, while the one in red is the black dahlia.”

Right. Go figure.

Being a cheap and lazy guy who doesn’t want to spend all his time at home online, I have consciously avoided getting another internet connection at home, after a previous TATA Indicom wireless modem connection outlasted its usefulness and was therefore unceremoniously discarded.

This meant that I did not check email / update my website / surf arbitly for seven whole days, and this has led to much rejoicing because it has shown me that I don’t depend on the net as much as I had previously assumed.

Nevertheless, despite the past seven days of my life having as much content as an entire season of Seinfeld, there were some random things I did manage to do, and one of them was to check out the new Swagath Garuda Mall in Jayanagar, after having written about it a few days ago.

Right at the outset, let me tell you that this building is an excuse for a mall. In fact, I would go on further to say that even a big bazaar in its place would’ve served a far better purpose, despite being among my least favourite establishments. At least the latter stacks up on half liter packets of Nestle Goodlife milk and Oreo cookies, combined with attractive discount offers on the purchase of Real Activ juice containers.

There is no common area in the mall like you have for most malls that you might’ve seen. There are only two entrances – one to climb the stairs to get to the third and fourth floors to reach the food court and INOX, and the other entrance to the Westside store, which occupies the entire ground floor.

The Landmark bookstore has no direct entrance and one has to get in through the Westside store to access it, and the entire roundabout way of accessing the few stores in that ‘mall’ would lead anyone to believe that they skipped the entire design phase during the making of this mall.

The ‘multiplex’, on a Monday afternoon, was screening three movies, one Telugu, one Kannada the other one being ‘Hello’. I’d rather have watch the same episode of ‘Hum Paanch’ six times in a row, than sit through any one of those three movies being screened at that time.

At 1600 on Monday, I think I was the only person not employed at that mall who was present there, and although I was totally thrilled about the absolute lack of people, it was quite evident that the lack of people was due to the lack of anything worthwhile to do at that place.

I wish to apologize to anyone who wants to take this apology for having gone out on a limb to engage in premature celebrations with regard to how this mall and the multiplex and bookstore within would change the face of south Bangalore as we knew it. To my immense relief, PVR isn’t that far away from this mall in any case. Maybe south Bangalore doesn’t really need a mall because we aren’t mall rats per se.

I confess to cheaply conforming to LOL speak in my post ‘Hai World’. Additionally, some of the tech offices of the more chilled-out kind in the US use this lingo in official communication or while checking in code into the version control repository. LOL Dogs and LOL Code are further spin-offs of this phenomenon.

I would encourage all those willing, able and enthusiastic enough to use LOL speak in their lingo, so long as they don’t mess with regular english spelling and only tamper with the grammatical aspects of the language.

Moving on, Tech Speak is a relatively lesser known malaise plaguing the Indian IT industry. Instances of Tech Speak have effects on virtually every IT office within the country, but incidents of its break out have been brushed under the carpet and despite awareness of its presence, no remedial actions have been taken to stem its growth or to quell it once and for all.

Examples of Tech Speak are too many to be exhaustively listed here, but some of the gems that one can come up with are as follows:

‘I can’t able to access the central server.‘
‘He is bad at communication. He can’t able to speak properly.‘ (Reason stated for turning down a person’s candidature during an interview.)
Our country national anthem are voted by UNESCO as best. I am having proud tears of joy.

Tech speak is prevailent in all IT offices, and is something that can be remedied among the nicer guys who ail from it by correcting them nicely and guiding them appropriately. The sad part of this is that there are enough bozos and clowns around who think no end of themselves and their ‘communication skills’, who are hit by this in an even worse fashion, and are therefore past the point of salvaging.

I am highly certain that ‘fraandship‘, popularized by Orkut, is also something that originated from Tech Speak.

The first step towards addressing this is to become self-aware of its presence and acknowledging it. One way is to embrace Tech Speak much like LOL Speak has been adopted. Now, if you feel that LOL Speak is cool and Tech Speak isn’t, you’re a prudish one-dimensional wannabe. When we make Tech Speak cool enough, more people will notice it, and those that are not lazy enough will try to remedy it.

Additional measures to keep Tech Speak in check can be put into place. I had come up with this idea of creating a simple software, appropriately named ‘Tech Speak, given to firangs who work with us Indians, for them to understand the nuances of our language.

This software will act similar to Babelfish and have two fields:

• What the techie says:
• What the techie means :

Filling up the first one and pressing enter will give out the corresponding string in coherent English, thereby eliminating all possible communcation gaps.

Lastly, I recently overheard someone singing a Kylie Minogue song in Tech Speak:
‘I just can’t able to get you out of my head….’

What can I say, Tech Speak rocks!